YARC

I’ve been interested in the language for a long time now. My Perl background gives me a lot of sympathy for scripting languages in general. My C++/Java background gives me a keen desire for good OO languages. Ruby gives me all of this and more, including one of the best syntaxes I’ve experience in terms of letting you do what you need, while keeping out of the way.

All this has come about through my work on the CAMS website. I was able to spend a small amount of extra time in preparation for the work, so I opted to pick up extra skills in Ruby. There is no dynamic content on the CAMS website, but there is a very consistent look and feel across all pages. This means that I wanted to use some sort of templating solution. A bit of research turned up the ERB templating system for Ruby. An ERB template is very similar to an equivalent JSP, except the embedded language is Ruby (of course).

The development process was a little wobbly at first, but as I became more confident with the language, development became much easier, and I was very happy with the final result.

With the website done, I’m back into Java development with my new employer, but I think that I will continue with some extracurricular research. Hmmm… Ruby on Rails, anyone?